The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out-of-home care and child protection interventions. The work scales up a pilot study in the West Midlands to an all-England sample, representative of English regions and different levels of deprivation at a local authority (LA) level. The analysis evidences a strong relationship between deprivation and intervention rates and large inequalities between ethnic categories. There is further evidence of the inverse intervention law (Bywaters et al., 2015): For any given level of neighbourhood deprivation, higher rates of child welfare interventions are found in LAs that are less deprived overall. These patterns are taking place in the context of cuts in spending on English children's services between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015 that have been greatest in more deprived LAs. Implications for policy and practice to reduce such inequalities are suggested.

The relationship between children's material circumstances and child abuse and neglect raises a series of questions for policy, practice, and practitioners. Children and families in poverty are significantly more likely to be the subject of state intervention. This article, based on a unique mixed‐methods study of social work interventions and the influence of poverty, highlights a narrative from practitioners that argues that, as many poor families do not harm their children, it is stigmatizing to discuss a link between poverty and child abuse and neglect. The data reveal that poverty has become invisible in practice, in part justified by avoiding stigma but also because of a lack of up‐to‐date research knowledge and investment by some social workers in an “underclass” discourse. We argue, in light of the evidence that poverty is a contributory factor in the risk of harm, that it is vital that social work engages with the evidence and in critical reflection about intervening in the context of poverty. We identify the need for fresh approaches to the harms children and families face in order to support practices that engage confidently with the consequences of poverty and deprivation.

A B S T R AC TResearch internationally has identified large differences in rates of child safeguarding interventions, recently characterized as child welfare inequalities, markers of social inequalities in childhood with parallels to inequalities in health and education. This paper reports a Nuffield Foundation-funded study to examine the role of deprivation in explaining differences in key children's services interventions between and within local authorities (LAs). The study involved an analysis of descriptive data on over 10% of children on child protection plans or in out-of-home care in 14 English LAs at 31 March 2012. The data demonstrate very large inequalities in rates of child welfare interventions within and between LAs, systematically related to levels of deprivation. There is evidence of a gradient in child welfare inequalities across the whole of society. There also appears to be an equivalent of the inverse care law for health: For any given level of deprivation in local neighbourhoods, LAs with lower overall levels of deprivation were intervening more often. The findings raise fundamental questions for research, policy and practice including whether the allocation of children's service resources sufficiently recognize the impact of deprivation on demand and how we judge whether a safeguarding system is effective at the population level. bs_bs_banner

Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding.Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary divide between bias and risk (or need).Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the 'inverse intervention law', is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services.

A B S T R AC TChild welfare systems internationally exhibit very large inequalities in a variety of dimensions of practice, for example, in rates of child protection plans or registrations and out-of-home care. Previous research in the midlands region of England (Bywaters; Bywaters et al.) has detailed key aspects of the relationship between levels of neighbourhood deprivation and intervention rates. This paper reports further evidence from the study examining the intersection of deprivation with aspects of identity: gender, disability, ethnicity and age. Key findings include a decreasing gender gap and a decreasing proportion of children in need reported to be disabled as deprivation increases. The data challenge the perception that black children are more likely than white to be in out-of-home care, a finding that only holds if the much higher level of deprivation among black children is not taken into account. Similarly, after controlling for deprivation and age, Asian children were found to be up to six times less likely to be in out-of-home care. The study requires replication and extension in order that observed inequalities are tested and explained. Urgent ethical, research, policy and practice issues are raised about child welfare systems.

The views of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have, until recently, largely been neglected in research, policy and practice. This article focuses on qualitative research which explored children's lived experience, drawing attention to the ways that they actively 'take' responsibility for managing their physical, psychological and emotional well-being within the constraints of a medical diagnosis. The neglect of a tradition which asks children about their own experiences of ADHD is crucially bound up with children's low social and political status in UK society and notions of competency and responsibility in relation to ADHD.

The health and wellbeing of children and young people has been studied from a range of different perspectives in social science and the health sciences as a whole. Much of the research to date has been for or on children and has focused on promoting health, detecting illness and its causes or investigating the social determinants of health. While these make vital contributions to making the world better for children and young people, we would argue there is also a need for research with children, research from a child perspective, to fully understand the meaning and impact of health and illness in children's lives. Furthermore, there is a need to explore the social and cultural contexts of child health that frame the lived experiences of children and their parents. More specifically, there is a need to interrogate the explicit as well as the implicit perceptions of childhood and the child in health policy, perceptions that are reproduced in various health and social practices. The purpose of this issue is to contribute to a further understanding of these issues by bridging developments in the sociology of childhood and the sociology of health and illness.In the last decades we have seen a growing interest across disciplines in research on children's own experiences and understandings of health and illness. It can be argued that this increasing interest has been stimulated by developments in the sociology of childhood. Through the 1990s a body of work emerged which criticised dominant notions of child development where children were largely depicted as immature and passive objects of socialisation (Burman 1994, Halldén 1991, James and Prout 1997, Qvortrup 1994.Scholars of the sociology of childhood problematised these notions of the child by theorising the ways in which childhood is socially constructed and understandings of the child vary across different sociocultural contexts. Importantly, the focus was shifted from seeing children as immature becomings on their way to adulthood to a focus on children as beings and as competent actors with a social agency of their own, not only influenced by but also influencing their social worlds (James et al. 1998, James and Prout 1997, Qvortrup 1994. Moreover, by understanding children as a specific social group, attention could be directed at children's rights and the structures that enabled and restricted control over their lives (Alanen and Mayall 2001).Since these early years, the theoretical positions and central concepts in the sociology of childhood (and its place in sociology) have been, and are, debated (see, for example, Alanen 2014, James 2010, Moran-Ellis 2010). At the same time, empirical studies of children and childhoods have been burgeoning in sociology and in other disciplines. Although a full account of these developments and disciplinary differences falls outside the scope of this issue, here we want to draw attention to some of the central concepts and theoretical points of departure in this tradition that we find of particular interest for studies of c...

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